From the middle of a course

Hi guys 🙂
I miss you all, I’m in the middle of the course “Interactive High Quality Rendering” in the UCI college in Havana, is based on the Monte Carlo rendering methods and the PBRT methods from Paul Guerrero a professor of a graphic research group at a Viena Institute. !WOW!
One thing is reading the PBRT book but another is actually getting things explained! I have clarified many things and concepts from my first attempt to write an unbiased render for Blender and I’m pretty sure that this course eventually will be reverted in Blender in the future 🙂
I have a long road-map now regarding Unlimited Clay and Particle surfacing after I finish this course but eventually I would like to contribute to the render module again with much more experience and best of all, for the time I finish my current projects I hope Blender render module will be merged with render branch and shading system improvements will be in place 🙂
And another important thing is that i have gather here tons of resources on graphics, math, physics papers, documents, etc (around 80 GB 😉 ) of many renown authors and researchers.
Cheers to all Farsthary

17 thoughts on “From the middle of a course”

i am glad you have access to rescources and knowledge that inspire you. I am always looking forward reading your blogposts seeing what you came up with. like i said many times – your communication is very speical and unique.

what i mean is that – the guys from luxrender are coding renderengine with pathtracing/progressive stochastic photon mapping (u can swith them on the fly during rendering) and it is gpu and cpu based – if u have openCL gfx u can try it out

second thing is telnet controll over it – u can change camera, material parameters , sunsky parameters ON THE FLY – its amazing to play with it

so maybe u would take a look at it and if u feel – help the Dade (main coder of slg) to add features/optimize etc and maybe u will gain great experience u can use for blender realtime-gpu-renderer ?

Great Raul, hope everything is fine, now the developers are pushing hard the sculpt tools, would be nice to unify sometime in the future all the actual projects into the main branch, the GSOC sculpt project is looking fantastic, with your unlimited clay would be even more amazing, also I’m really looking forward about the way it works sculptris when you click and drag and it expand the mesh up to the last mouse position without having to click several times to subdivide the mesh to the place you want.

Along these lines, I’m wondering how the unlimited clay modifier would handle reducing polygons in necessary places. Scuptris has a reduce poly brush that is great. Would this modifier be able to avoid that step by adding and removing resolution as the mesh is sculpted?

Yes, good point, Michael. But decimate can be painfully slow on dense meshes because it works on the whole mesh. In an ideal world, there would be a way to selectively decimate a specific area.

If possible it would be awesome if there was an option in unlimited clay so that when you smooth out an area, the modifier would sense that less resolution would be needed to define that area, and polys could be removed.

The only way I can see this working smoothly using decimate modifier is:

. unify sculpt with some kind of weight painting. As you sculpt, a virtual weight map is modified.
. this map is passed as a parameter to decimate modifier so it knows where the mesh had been sculpted by few previous strokes.
. as you sculpt, the older strokes in the weight map fade out.

Simple concept, but I am not a developer. Do not know about its feasibility. 😛